Antibiotic micelles as a cure for Lyme neuroborreliosis
Western technology has failed. Western society has failed. It has failed to properly diagnose Lyme patients. It has failed to properly treat Lyme patients. And it is still failing us, with no improvement in sight. Our supposedly enlightened world is much less capable and much more corrupt than some people like to believe.
Faced with the institutionalized (because most profitable) incompetence of the Western Medical-Industrial complex, people get increasingly desperate. And desperate people often do desperate things. They see no other choice than to follow harmful Lyme "protocols", buy useless "zappers" and pop expensive "detoxers". To no avail. Everything has been tried already. MMS, Hyperbaric Oxygen, Hydrogen peroxide infusions, the Marshall protocol, Rife machines, salt/vit. C, ICHT, Cholestyramine. Nothing ever works. Not even high doses of the intravenous antibiotic Ceftriaxone, administered for years. Why is that? Are Lymies hypochondriacs? Do they suffer from post-Lyme syndrome, a kind of auto-immunity? We think that it is more likely that we are still ill because the mumbo-jumbo-voodoo nonsense doesn't work, and antibiotics don't fully cure Lyme neuroborreliosis either. Why not?
Antibiotics usually do not fully cure Lyme neuroborreliosis because:
- Antibiotics need to be able to penetrate the blood-brain barrier (bbb) in order to achieve bacteriostatic (MIC) or bactericidal levels in the CNS. The oral antibiotics able to do that can be counted on the fingers on one hand, and the doses required to attain MIC are already quite toxic to the patient. Bactericidal levels can only be attained when such high doses are used that liver- or kidney failure likely results before the infection has been eradicated, so those dosages are hardly ever prescribed. You would need at least 1 gram/day of Doxycycline for it to be bactericidal. 500 mg/day is often the minimum dose to remain stable in symptoms. 600 mg/day yields very slow improvement, noticeable only by the month. Doctors don't prescribe much higher doses. There just doesn't exist any oral combo that won't kill the patient first before eradicating all spirochetes in the brain.
- The intravenous antibiotics administered in a hospital do not penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Ceftriaxone for example can only reach the CNS in case of meningitis or encephalopathy. That is why in the initial stages of IV Lyme treatment, the neurological symptoms improve tremendously. But then the inflammation of the cappilary veins that feed the brain abates and their epithelial cells "close ranks" and the bbb is intact again. The patient, while on IV treatment, will remain below encephalopathy but will never be cured. Off IV-treatment, he wil deteriorate to the level of a compromised bbb, and IV abx. will rescue him again, until he stabilizes. Your doctor will disagree when you tell him this. To set him straight, refer him to this:
Zhonghua Nei Ke Za Zhi. 1989 Jun;28(6):340-2, 381. PMID:2582913.
[The penetration of cephalosporins across the blood-brain barrier and its clinical significance].
[Article in Chinese]
Zhang YY, Wu PJ, Zhang Q."The penetration of Cefuroxime (CXM), Ceftazidime (CTZ), Cefotaxime (CTX), Ceftizoxime (CZX), and Ceftriaxone (CTRX) across the blood-brain barrier was studied in 119 patients with or without meningitis after an intravenous injection of 2 grams. Cephalosporins were undetectable or their concentrations very low in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), when there was no inflammation in the meninges. On the contrary, the mean CSF concentrations of cephalosporins were 2.21-5.36 micrograms/ml and the CSF/serum ratios 3.73-31.80% in acute stage of purulent meningitis."
So we had to wait for the Chinese to come and show us that not even intravenous antibiotics will work against Lyme disease. All IV antibiotics used to treat Lyme neuroborreliosis are next to useless. And this has been known since at least 1989. But your Infectious disease specialist doesn't know or doesn't care. Hence the "Chronic Lyme can't possibly exist" controversy. It is based on the false assumption that intravenous Ceftriaxone or Claforan can reach the brain parenchyma of a person without meningitis or encephalopathy. They can not.
Apart from the above problems, there are myriads of additional barriers the Bb spirochete erects: They go intracellularly, so the antibiotic also need to attain bactericidal levels inside neurons. Bb encysts itself and can lie dormant, viable for weeks or months, unaffected by antibiotics, until the antibiotics are discontinued and the spirochete emerges from its cyst. Bb has a so-called "efflux pump", with which it removes antibiotic molecules from its protoplasm. It can physically migrate away from high antibiotic concentrations. It can release RNA-blebs that can lie dormant for months, until they form fully-functioning spirochetes again. And Borreliae multiply and grow slowly, being only susceptible to antibiotics when they replicate or synthesise new cell wall.
Still, all those tricks would not be able to stand up against a prolonged antibiotic onslaught. At least, that is what we think. We think we have reason to assume that "Post Lyme Syndrome" is not autoimmune, but infectious in origin. And we think that if we would have a way to put a high concentration of especially Bb-busting antibiotics into neurons, that Lyme may be cured in three to six weeks. Frustratingly, those antibiotics that kill Borreliae the best do not penetrate the bbb at all.
Great minds have tried to solve this problem. Without antibiotics in the brain, the bacteria will multiply unabated, because the CNS is "immune privileged". The fact is, our own T-cells can't penetrate the bbb either. Only antibodies can. They are small enough. But antibodies can only be produced after an immune cell encounters a bacterium. And that is impossible, in the brain. One of the things that would allow the body to keep producing Bb antibodies is a brain shunt which would discharge cerebrospinal fluid into a vein, so that the immune system would continue to encounter Bb antigens. But this is an invasive procedure and good luck trying to get one installed. Another idea is to temporarily open the bbb with certain chemicals. Also this approach hasn't borne much fruit yet. But there is a method that provenly deposist powerful antibiotics straight into neurons. Nearly all antibiotics can be introduced into the CNS that way, including antibiotics that are extremely effective in killing Borrelia burgdorferi s.l., antibiotics that normally can't penetrate the blood-brain barrier. This method uses nanotechnology called Micelles. Just as it is a Chinese team who discovered in 1989 that commonly used intravenous antibiotics do not penetrate the blood-brain barrier and hence have nearly no curative effect on brain infections, in 2009 a Chinese team discovered a way of making any antibiotic pass the bbb. This century will belong to China, and it is time we start paying attention to their inventions.
Micelles can bring any antibiotic into neurons
We all have learned in school how a detergent works. A detergent is a long molecule. One end "likes" greasy stuff, and the other end likes water. This way, fatty smudges will get billions and billions of these molecules embedded in them, until the attracting force of the water pulling at their other ends dislodges the greasy spot and carries it away as a suspended oil droplet.
Suitable "detergent" molecules can be created by attaching a hydrophilic Polyethylene Glycol molecule to a hydrophobic b-Cholesterol molecule. They can be coated with a cell-penetrating peptide, and via membrane dialysis, the antibiotic molecules are"payloaded" into the micelle. The micelles look like this under a scanning electron microscope:
These nanoparticles need to ideally be 120 nm in diameter to penetrate our cells best. The technology to assemble them is awesome. An example of the ingenuity involved is the cell-penetrating peptide used to coat the micelle. This is a peptide used by the HIV virus to infect our cells! It is time that we start respecting Chinese technology.
OwnDoc means "Be your own doctor". Hippocrates is said to have said: "He who is not his own doctor is a fool". Micelle production is serious business. Backscatter detectors and desktop electron microscopes cost very serious money. We are currently investing the profit from our online store into this venture, because it will hopefully benefit Lyme patients as much as it will benefit me, Sarah Vaughter, the owner of the store and the author of the articles on this site. I have decided to take the risk and become the world's first human guineapig for antibiotic micelles in an attempt to cure myself of chronic Lyme disease for which I have been taking oral antibiotics for the past 14 years. We will document our progress on this site. It will take time though. If it cures me, I don't think we will ever be able to make this available to anyone else, but at least we will publish our results and methods so that others can hopefully replicate them.
If chronic Lyme is due to spirochetal activity, which we think it is, antibiotic micelles will likely be able to either cure the patient, or very significantly reduce symptoms. Because this technique really works. The below photo is of micelles inside rat neurons:
The micelles were loaded with fluorescent dye to make them visible under a microscope. The arrows point to micelles inside neurons. More neurons in the picture have micelles in them, such as the two left of the top arrow. The antibiotic has not only reached the brain - within hours, when the micelle membrane degrades, it will be released inside the neurons themselves, where Borrelia likes to hide out. It has been known for a long time that Borrelia spirochetes, the bacteria that cause Lyme neuroborreliosis, hide inside neurons. Judith Miklossy shows photographic evidence of this in "Persisting atypical and cystic forms of Borrelia burgdorferi and local inflammation in Lyme neuroborreliosis":
Antibiotic micelles may provide a cure for a host of other neurological syndromes of unknown etiology, since there is strong evidence to suggest that at least a large percentage of Alzheimer, ALS and MS are caused by spirochetal bacteria (Lyme and oral Treponema). Scientists agree that polymeric micelles are the future of oral drug delivery. See also here.